Micere Mugo's achievements were like 'the force of hurricanes'

Despite Kenya being a free country at the time the play was being staged at the National Theatre, it had to take the intervention of the Culture Ministry for The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and Francis Imbuga's Betrayal in the City to find space at the KNT, where British-themed plays enjoyed domination.

The revolutionary fire that saw Micere team up with Ngugi to write The Trial of Dedan Kimathi continued to burn inside her, and which eventually saw her being incarcerated, in the end, driving her into exile, first to Zimbabwe, in 1982 and later to the US where she joined her co-author Ngugi.

Such was the poisoned nature of her relations with the government that saw her being stripped of Kenyan citizenship. Luckily for her, the Mugabe-led ZANU-PF regime, before it went rogue, came to her rescue and offered her citizenship.

It should be recalled that even when she was teaching at the University of Nairobi, Micere was a trailblazer, rising through the ranks to become the first female faculty dean in Kenya's history. Her research and teaching interests included African, African American and Caribbean Literature; African Orature; Creative Writing; Drama and Theatre, cultural and film studies; and education. She was especially passionate in her activism and support of African Orature.

Writing in Coming of Age: Strides in African Publishing, a collection of essays meant to celebrate Dr Henry Chakava, the chairman of East African Educational Publishers, Micere traced the roots of African Orature to the Colloquium of the Second Black World Festival of Arts and Culture, in Lagos, Nigeria, as championed by Pio Zirimu and Austin Bukenya.

Orature, she wrote, would no longer be viewed as the younger sibling of literature. "Orature would henceforth be Orature: an independent, liberated, indigenous art form, with the freedom to define its ethics and aesthetics on/in its own terms; an alternative site of scholarship," she added.

Micere was both fiery and feisty in her activism and fight for human rights and any form of oppression. In that essay, she celebrates stories of stoic resistance, songs of rebellion; "poems of rebellion and hope... proving that no enslaver, however powerful, can chain oppressed people's imagination. Hail to those orature creations that became literature!"

Among the many accolades that have been bestowed upon her, in her long literary career, include the Ford Foundation Award for Research on African Orature and Human Rights, The Rockefeller Foundation Award for Writing and Publication and The Royal African Society Lifetime Award in Literature in 2021.

In 2002, The East African Standard (now The Standard) included Micere in the Top 100 Kenyans, who influenced Kenya the Most, during the 20th Century. Apart from The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Micere also wrote The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti, My Mother's Poem and Other Stories and The Imperative of Utu/Ubuntu in Africana Scholarship.

At the time of her death, Micere was a literary critic and professor of literature in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.